


Road Stories

by mustinvestigate



Series: Nora Freis [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Oral Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Vaginal Fingering, too drunk to drive even by 1950s standards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-19 23:12:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5983831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another quiet in-between story before the plot kicks back in, playing with dialogue and stream-of-consciousness malarkey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Road Stories

"Fourth Street? Nah, no idea where that was."

"It wasn't far from the Capitol Building. In fact, we were close enough that I and the other 'girls from the steno pool', as the Major insisted on calling us, had a few picnic lunches out on the mall, especially when the cherry blossoms were out."

"Cherry blossoms, hah! That whole mall's the Warzone now, Steel looming up in the monument, muties dug in trenches and tunnels, backed up by the ghouls and freaks in all the old museums. It's a miracle of enemy-of-my-enemy cooperation that'd probably warm your heart."

"Actually…that doesn't sound too different from the Mall politics in my day, minus the literal bloodshed."

MacCready would bet any amount of caps there's no one alive sharing idle road conversation like he has with Nora, especially since he learned she spent a few years in the Capital. It's almost spooky, the thought that she walked the same streets he and Lucy did, zoomed along metro tunnels they crept through, back before the bombs transformed his hometown into a string of glowing craters and rubble.

"I doubt the old apartment building in Friendship Heights is still standing. It was held together by duct tape and happy thoughts back when the government bought it for a nickel to stuff us DC military ladies into."

"Don't know - the Heights is Steel territory. We never got close."

"I had to share a kitchen and bathroom with three other women. It was barbaric. And whenever the elevator went out, which was most of the time, the pizza joint across the street refused to deliver. We had to walk there on our feet, like savages."

"Such hardships you suffered."

"The Commonwealth's a doddle in comparison."

She never seems upset at the bad state DC's in - in fact, she looks almost cheerful when he says her office building was probably in a stretch that's all impassable rubble now.

"Those weren't good years," she tells him once, which he could gather easily enough from how many bars she uses as landmarks. He follows up her more cheerful stories with, "And that's why you quit drinking!" It makes her laugh every time. She waits now, after the worse ones, cueing him with her old rueful smile so she can say it more or less in unison with him, "And that's why we quit drinking."

"There was a happy hour near Union Station we used to hit after work, a real dive with a killer house band. It was mostly us government workers and soldiers on leave, quite the hothouse for torrid one-nighters. Once there was a handsome fellow, Bob, who said he was an attaché usually stationed in the West German embassy, and just so terribly lonesome for his wife and kids back in Ohio. When Betty was dumb enough to tell him we all worked together, and where, boy, he hit us hard. I actually sprained a finger punching that perfectly cleft chin when he wouldn't take 'I'm married, no really, fuck off' for an answer. Well, Lana fell for him anyway, poor girl…"

"Poor girl? Any idiot who takes up with a cheater deserves what they get."

"Hmm."

"What?"

"Nothing. She was a sweet kid, really, very smart but not a figure you'd pick out of a crowd. So she wasn't exactly thinking with her brain when this matinée idol wanted to bring her lunch, linger around the office charming her green-eyed colleagues, and gee, he was such a computer whiz he'd be happy to just pop on everyone's machines and make them really zoom through records retrieval!"

"So he wasn't in love?"

"No. He was a spy, of course. You could glean a lot of intel from military procurement records, which is why we were contractually forbidden to tell anyone what we did for a living - in fact, we were officially on the payroll as entry-level secretaries. Bob was pinched passing stolen records behind the Lincoln Memorial, and half the team was court-martialled. Lupe and Marilyn just got life in prison - rumour was they landed in one of the concentration camps out west - while Betty and Lana were executed as co-conspirators."

"Ok, I agree with the 'poor girl' after all."

"It was fortunate, I suppose, that I'd held a grudge hard enough to call security on Bob when I came back from lunch to find him lurking around my desk, just because he'd been such a creep back in the bar."

"…and that's why you quit drinking?"

"No, that's why us survivors drank twice as much. We now had orders to attend that happy hour every evening, you see, to ferret out more spies with our feminine wiles. Uncle Sam picked up the tab."

There's not many bars left in the Capital Wasteland, he tells her, and most of them are in Steel territory. Of the rest, the only ones not serving up tetanus and blindness with their booze are run by ghouls. Not that he cares, since the bigots who avoid them are usually jagoffs anyway; all the better to have a quiet drink and maybe hear some good stories from a centuries-old bartender.

"I had my first drink at six - never looked back."

"Christ, you were advanced. I think I was at least 12 before I raided my parents' liquor cabinet. Earned the whipping of my life after I threw up behind the couch."

"That's why we left - or got kicked out - before we turned into adults. Red and Lucy kept the hard drugs locked up in the infirmary, but otherwise, it was anarchy. Wouldn't of had it any other way."

"And yet you won't even curse in front of your own son."

"Fine, I wouldn't of had it any other way, _for me_."

"Uh huh, and if he's drinking at six?"

"Um…there's got to be an alternative to 'the whipping of his life', right?"

"A long lecture on moderation and responsibility. While you do that, I'll go outside to laugh my lungs inside out, y'know, to keep your authority intact."

"Yeah, thanks. Have I ever told you how great it is, having you to back me up?"

"And here I thought that was sincere."

"…ok, yeah, it was."

"I know."

Whiskey and cigarettes keep appearing in the hidden pocket of his pack next to the old soldier toy, along with the occasional useful item like a spare pair of socks or gloves. When he asks her (or lately, just holds them up with a raised eyebrow when he comes across them after a stretch he knows the bag hasn't been out of his sight), she shrugs and suggests Santa Claus as the likeliest culprit.

He's not sure if he should be more proud or concerned that she's taken to pickpocketing so well, but he definitely wishes she'd progress in her sniping lessons half so quickly.

"No, you had to test far better than me to get into the sniper training programs. The closest thing I had to sharpshooting instruction was hunting deer with my dad. He was like you, totally self-taught, a bit of a redneck, really."

"A redneck? That doesn't sound like a compliment, Nor."

"Aah…it's not exactly uncomplimentary, really. It's more…someone who'd get up at 4 in the morning to go hunting, and then by 10 be hunkered down out of the rain in a cowboy bar."

"A very wise man, then, I got ya. Right, try it again. Headshot. One bullet. You can do this."

Those little gifts could be sold - should be sold, his gut automatically insists - but, heck. Since they upped their game and started hitting small Gunner outposts as often as raider nests, scuttling back to Sanctuary or into the city when those meatheads get a nose too close to their trail, they're rolling in caps. There's a little avalanche now every time she opens the safe back in Sanctuary where she keeps her fusion cores to chuck a few more in. It's a lot more risky, targeting an organised enemy like the Gunners on the regular, but business is good…too good. She's only a few cores away now from leaving, when he'd expected at least another month knocking around the Commonwealth with her, do-gooding for fun and profit.

It's too soon, way too soon, unless his crazy idea of tracking down the Railroad pays off and one of those creepy synths can point them toward a back door or storm drain that'll lead them right into the Institute. He'd be happy to crawl in through an active sewer system, or even an old metro tunnel. Any route closer to her kid that he could stick by her side, like she did for him.

"You sure you never made it out near Lamplight?"

"Pretty sure - I never had much reason to go to Virginia. I might have seen a billboard for it once on the drive out to Vegas, but…honestly, I'm probably mis-remembering. I'd guess, though, it was nice. Residential, lots of families, parents commuting into DC every day."

"It's mostly empty, now, or was before the settlements spread out west. We'd of had to detour pretty far to stop by and see who was still around, even if they'd have welcomed a visit."

"You get homesick for Lamplight?"

"I guess…sometimes. Or more, I miss the people I grew up with once in a while. They…they were good kids."

"They sound like it."

She enjoys hearing about the old days, remembers all the names, insists he'd have made a fortune in the old world if he wrote them down as a children's adventure series - or, even better, a comic serial on the shelves next to Grognak and the Unstoppables. He has his doubts there, unless he cut out all the drinking, smoking, and pretty much everything the older kids got up to, and then what was the point of even remembering?

"So where'd all the kids come from, anyway?"

"Well…some were born there. I mean, we didn't leave until we were 16."

"Jesus."

"What?"

"Nothing. Just the pre-war mindset. I suppose no one had a college education to miss out on changing diapers."

"Nope. They'd go out expecting to set up home somewhere and come back, then…didn't. But mostly new kids and babies just appeared in front of the cave. Lots of orphans in the wasteland…and we haven't exactly run across many nurseries in these raider camps, huh?"

"I hadn't really thought about that."

"Some of the older ones said I got dropped off after raiders hit our farm, that they were going to get settled somewhere safe and come back. But they told a lot of kids that, so who knows? It's not like any of us cared about parents we couldn't remember."

She's quiet for a while, until he changes the subject, a little stung that she does seem to care that he's probably some raider's kid, way back. But it's only a couple miles and a skirmish with a would-be highwayman before she's asking about Lamplight again.

"We all usually blew to the winds after we left Lamplight. Heck, if I hadn't taken a bullet from a contract target in the old police station just south of Big Town, caught Lucy there before she went out on her own, I probably wouldn't ever have seen her again."

"That's…strangely sweet. Although, for the comic, I probably wouldn't keep the 'fell in love while nursed back to health from assassination blowback' angle. Maybe, instead, you fell out of a tree saving an orphan kitten?"

"It's no 'ditching the guy you were actually dating to drink moonshine and play banned records with his roommate', is it?"

"What, no? Forget Romeo and Juliet - that's the romance people will still know by heart in another 600 years."

Their pasts are too entangled with lost loves to really talk around them. She tends to wrap any mention of Nate in layers of sarcasm and too-pointed humour, only tell stories that make one or both of them look ridiculous. He knows it isn't for his benefit.

"We planned to tell Shaun we met as volunteers in the VA hospital. Although I suppose no one now would be horrified to learn his father collected media from commies, junkies, perverts, and catholics."

"Well…the catholics…"

She tries once to explain those old world tribes, why she'd had to covert from "lapsed Catholic" to "Lutheran" to get married, but frankly, it makes the Church of Atom sound sane in comparison. Eventually, she gives up and promises she'll never eat anyone or drink their blood because, even symbolically, that would not go over well with any of her allies, except maybe Strong.

"But I'm keeping the guilt. It's my birthright."

That, at least, he understands. Guilt doesn't torment quite so much as hope.

He has a run of bad dreams, the old ones of Lucy dying, after he and Nora settle down. He doesn't tell her for a while, not sure how she'd react, just has some quiet night walks, smoking cigarettes from that first pack she sneaks into his bag. But she isn't upset, when she finally asks if he wants to talk about it.

"That happened to me, with my parents. They'd been gone a couple of years, everything settled, when it landed on me - I guess because I was pregnant, partly, but mostly because Nate was home for good. It was safe to sob my heart out that they'd never meet their grandchild, because I wasn't alone with it anymore."

She doesn't try to make a joke out of it, at least, but she still looks away, bites off the words like tough jerky. _Vulnerability is not my strength_. Her arm's tight around his waist, one hand rubbing his side.

"Yeah, well, your parents, that's different. I can't - it's not exactly fair to dump it on you when I'm missing Lucy, feeling like…I don't know."

"What, how it'd be if you and Lucy and Duncan were still all together in some nice little DC settlement? That would be better - that would unquestionably be better - than losing her and going through all that hell. You don’t have to…it doesn't… Santa brought you some whiskey, right?"

"Yeah…here."

"Thanks. Look, I'm happy with you, and you seem happy with me - "

"I am, Nor, I really am, don't think - "

"Shush. I'm saying, there's no deal you've got to make. Nothing like, like, you have to accept tragedy because eventually life got to be something you wanted to live again. That was a bad thing. Just…let it be a bad thing. You never have to be fine with it. Especially not for my sake."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah, okay. Can I have a drink before you finish that?"

"Oh…sorry."

"Man. I thought _I_ could put it away."

"Santa will bring you a fresh bottle."

"I'm not mad. Just impressed."

"Tell me a story, something happy. Something nice to remember."

"I will if you eat something. You're no fun hungover."

So for a while, that's the routine; when they change watch, she stays up a few more minutes while he maps out some neglected stretch of memory lane. After a couple weeks straight on the road, snatching three or four hours' sleep in twenty-four, this trails off, but so have the nightmares, whether from sheer exhaustion or the persistent onslaught of better memories.

She really doesn't mind him talking about Lucy, about the life they had years before he even met Nora. They're not much alike, aside from the quiet, seemingly limitless strength everyone else instinctually leans on. Lucy wasn't a fighter, and she hated the insecurity of constant travel. All she wanted was a little place in a well off settlement, a house full of sick patients and healthy kids. She knew the score, he was sure, when he left her someplace safe for a week and came back with a new scar or two and plenty of caps to resupply before they went back out, but held her peace. She didn't have Nora's hardness, certainly not her drive to melt down and remold the entire world if that's what it takes to get what she wants, and yeah, he does miss that sometimes. It was easier in a lot of ways.

"She sounds like one of my old college friends, a pre-med student. Serious, brilliant - and a mean card shark. She'd take us to the cleaners on poker night, but we never caught her cheating. Did Lucy play?"

"Yeah, but not very well. It was locks you had to watch around her. She had the whole _Tumblers Today_ set, and that innocent face - with someone to distract the owner for half a minute, there wasn't any safe she couldn't clean out and hang around to console them on the theft afterward."

"I wish I could do that. My mother taught me on her police pick set, and I'm still all thumbs with a bobby pin. Did she learn to be a doctor the same way, out of old books?"

"Uh, mostly, yeah, whatever Red didn't teach her. She'd read anything she could get her hands on, actually, even if it was totally useless to her, like a laser pistol maintenance manual."

"Sounds like she'd have wrecked the curve in university."

It's like it never occurs to Nora she might not measure up. _We were always talking about the future, where to head next, what we needed in a place to settle down, when to…_ he starts once, but abruptly switches to the time Lucy saved an Outcast knight's gangrenous hand and the bastards still searched through their supplies for technology to confiscate. It would sound like criticism - if he's honest, it is criticising - because if there's something he comes close to hating about Nora it's that foot she keeps out the door. Her sense of the future, at least as far as the two of them's concerned, ends at the next sundown.

"How's the shoulder?"

"Fine. Same as it was an hour ago."

He's almost entirely sure that shooting her in the back had nothing to do with that.

It was just a mistake, the kind that happens when you use a sniper rifle up close, automatically aiming through the scope instead of your eyes. Not the kind of mistake he makes, ever, and definitely not with her, but…

Just a mistake.

"Uuuuugh, ok, what else…there was calling for a truce, right, and there was role-playing as each other - which I am never, ever, _ever_ doing again…ever - and don't even get me started on the hopes/fears lists. Really, I've blocked out most of the whole counselling experience. Some traumas just go too deep."

"So the worst thing you ever experienced was talking about your marriage?"

"With a _military_ doctor."

"Still, it doesn't sound that bad. Maybe…almost…kinda nice. If it means you don't fight so much."

"Fine. Yes. To be honest, I was feeling more positive about the experience by the end, once we were past the doc's insistence I just 'keep the home fires warmer', i.e. not be such a frigid bi-, uh, wife - "

"A what?"

" - and moved on to advice that got us to behave like real adults. But then the Major must have pulled rank to get copies of my medical files, since he included some choice quotes from Nate in my quarterly performance review, so that rather soured me on the experience again."

They never have looped back to settle that argument, whether they're actually together, just together for now, or whatever Nora's got in mind. He's taken a few jabs, casually making plans, picking up toys for the boys' room back in Sanctuary, but she doesn't argue. So maybe he's won that one.

"'Jesus Christ' is not cursing."

"The way you say it is."

"Technically, it's blasphemy. In fact, given it could be a shorthand prayer, like, 'Hey, you up there on the cross, send me some strength over here!', it's really the opposite of cursing. Practically pious."

"Uh huh. And 'balls'?"

"Bouncy things. Kids play with them. Couldn't be more innocent."

"Is that so."

"It's very so."

"And 'bollocks'?"

"Fine, that's a curse, but not in this country. Here, it's just a silly made-up word, like 'wanker'."

"I'm still not buying that one, either."

"Fine. But not cursing is hard, dammit."

"You're telling me?"

She's working on a set of building blocks. They've got to be annoying, always slithering to the bottom of her bag with a corner jamming into her back. So far, she's got most of the alphabet, including six Es but no Xs or Zs, and actually paid good caps for a rare W from Trudy at the Drumlin Diner. She mentions once, very quietly, that it's easier to find toys for a little guy than a ten-year-old, and stares for quite a long time into the clouds when he points out a boy that age will want a bb gun and maybe a switchblade, not a teddy bear.

He finds the motherlode in, of all places, her old washing machine. She mentions that Codsworth's been sulking at the results of attempting to hand-clean without hands, so he clears out all the possibly-useful junk piled in the tiny laundry room and lifts the lid like he'd have any idea what to do with the guts inside. Instead, the old machine is packed with faded children's books, water-stained clothes and stuffed animals and, when he digs underneath, a tattered shoebox full of photos.

The bot's nervously hanging over his shoulder before he can pull any of it out, burbling to close the lid before Ma'am sees, that he'd saved the nearest, most important things for his family before the bombs landed and it would only break Ma'am's heart to find…

But she's already joined them to see what all the fuss is about.

"Oh god, our old books. We were saving them for Shaun…look, _The Doo Bee Book of Manners_ … _Ronnie the Redski_ … _You're Special!_ "

"Ma'am…"

"Codsworth, I can't believe you thought to do this, and after we ran out on you…"

"I always knew in my heart you'd return, Ma'am."

"Oh, honey…"

"Can I look at these?"

"Sure, as long as you promise to destroy any evidence of my unfortunate blonde phase."

He's seen photographs before, usually under broken glass and faded to bare outlines, but never of someone he knows. He holds up one so he can see her and it at the same time: Nora, in loose military fatigues, caressing the little books with shaking hands and setting them in wobbly piles on the old dryer; Nora, in bare feet and tight dress, standing akimbo in front of a _SOLD!_ sign on the front lawn. It makes his eyes want to cross, force the two figures into one.

The photos are small, with brittle crinkled edges, and look like they caught the worst of the washer's water damage over the decades. The loose ones at the bottom are stuck together and tear when he tries to separate them, leaving half a face, a disembodied hand on a shoulder, part of a fat bald man holding up a trophy. He leaves them alone and opens the ones still in envelopes, heavy paper that absorbed most of the soaking. The first is so strange - a couple in rumpled pre-war clothes, their features washed out in blinding sunlight, standing in front of what looks like a giant, cheerful deathclaw - that he has to break her absorption in the old books for an explanation.

"Oh, god…Dinky. I forgot all about Dinky."

"…Dinky?"

"Dinky the dinosaur. That was back when Nate was stationed in Nellis for advanced explosives training. I drove the whole way out to Las Vegas to visit him. We blew most of our pocket money in the Lucky 38 pretty much immediately and couldn't afford the Dean Domino show I'd had my heart set on, so we drove out into the desert. Nate said, if we were lucky, we'd catch a mafia hit and get the full Vegas experience. And that sky, once the lights were behind us, all those stars with nothing to hold them up…I can't describe it."

"It was like that when I left Lamplight - I'd been outside before, but now that I didn't have a nice safe cave to run back to, it…it was really something, all that space."

"Did it make your heart thump, like you didn't know whether to spin around like a little kid or throw yourself on the ground and hold tight so the earth couldn't throw you off?"

"A bit, maybe. Too many slavers in the area then to get a good spin going before a collar landed around your neck."

"We only had rattlesnakes to worry about. That, and once we sobered up, how to get back to civilization. So, yeah, eventually…"

He shuffles through the other photos in the envelope, giving faded images of Nate at a blackjack table, in front of a roulette wheel, leaning against a fancy bar, more concentration than they deserve. It's pretty easy to tell from the hesitation in her pauses whether she's skipping over sex or a fight (and he wonders sometimes if she can see through him as easily, so he never points it out). This is definitely a sex-under-the-desert-sky ellipsis.

She says he'd have liked Nate, everyone loved him, but he can't see it. The guy mostly sounds like a jerk, even figuring in that she clearly doesn't want to get sad remembering good times, but when she talks about travelling together - and he's not faking his interest when it's her photos, lifted high in the arms of a giant man wearing boxing gloves, miming a shoot-out with a painted cowboy, frozen mid-splash in a fancy fountain - it makes more sense. Seems like she's always needed a guy with a matching itch for adventure.

"We picked a random direction - almost exactly the opposite way we should have gone, as it turned out - and drove until we thought we'd gone crazy, because it really, truly looked like a dinosaur was peeking at us over the hills. But it was real, a giant fiberglass dinosaur out in the middle of nowhere, with a cheap hotel attached, thank god. I always regretted not buying one of the little Dinky dinosaur toys as a souvenir. There's probably none of them left in the world, now."

He lets her bury herself in the little books again, not pointing out that she still hasn't told him what a dinosaur was or why someone would build a giant statue of one, hotel attached or not. The way she trails off at the end, better to let it go.

He picks another envelope instead, almost immediately flipping it closed when the top picture shows her, with a rounder face, shorter hair, a tired smile aimed at the newborn baby on her shoulder. Yeah, no need to put that under her nose right now. He digs a little deeper, hoping to reach an earlier time - maybe her parents, that'd probably cheer her up - and opens the least damaged pack near the bottom.

"Hey, I think I found that blonde stage you mentioned."

"Oh dear, let me see…actually, you probably don't want to look any further in that set."

It's too late, of course. In the top photo, a quite young Nora, hair light and straight, lies on a small bed frowning into a book as thick as a paving slab, and in the next, she's wearing significantly less in a wide-legged, spine-twisting sexy pinup pose somehow not a whit undercut by that familiar wry smile. No power in the universe could keep him from flipping through the rest…at least until the first glimpse of a naked dick.

Definitely no bigger than him. Not that you can really tell from a small blurry photograph.

"Yeah…I'll just…take those, shall I?"

"Sure."

"We, uh, we had a friend in the art department. He had a sideline processing the kinds of film that might get you arrested at the drug store kiosk."

"Sure."

"I'll go ask Codsworth to torch these, and put the others in the safe. No point leaving around evidence I'm a bit older than I look."

"You don't have to - I mean, if you want to keep them, I don't have a problem with…that."

"Honestly, I forgot we ever took them, even before the bombs…well. And although no one's yet given me any crap for being both the general and a woman, I can't help but think my authority would take a ding if these got out."

"Ok, sure. If that's what you want."

"You want to keep the first two, maybe?"

"…sure."

He filches the other one before she closes the box, her with baby Shaun, and leaves all three in the bedside table in the drawer that sticks almost too hard to open. They're too fragile to survive long in his pack.

"I ever tell you about our pack brahmin?"

"You had one of those?"

"For a little while."

They keep their voices low despite the pre-dawn fog blanketing Bunker Hill that makes it feel like they're the only two people in the Commonwealth. For once, she wakes up not long after him, but from the shudder and deep breath it takes before her eyes really focus on him, he's pretty sure a bad dream shook her out of sleep. They roll their blankets away and creep out of the bunkhouse without a word, finding a banked cookfire with a few embers left to warm their hands over while they split a pack of tasteless chips for breakfast. After a few minutes of watching the monument's top peek through the fog and disappear again (remembering, _You should see the one we've got back in DC_ and _Only every day for three years…oh, I never did tell you that, did I?_ ), he has a story in mind that might make her laugh.

"Her name was Spike."

"Spike?"

"Well, the farmer we bought her off of called her 'Lulabell', but she was definitely a Spike. We got her cheap since the farmer was sure she'd had her last calf and was going dry - hah. There was so much milk, the three of us couldn't drink it all. Spike was just moping with boredom back on that farm…she was a tough old broad who needed adventure."

"Yes, one hears that so often with cows…pining for excitement, sneaking off to join the foreign legion…"

"You laugh. She loved the road. Usually, when you get attacked - you've seen it, the pack brahmins just flee off wildly, usually right into the claws of the nearest deathclaw. But Spike, she dug right in and fought back. We thought it was something when she flattened a couple of molerats and ran right into a pack of mongrels, the huge ones that breed in the metro tunnels. But then we were ambushed by raiders outside of Arefu, five of them that almost pinned us down by the river. I killed two and turned around to see Spike kick one right in the junk, fling him so hard into a bridge pylon that his back snapped, crack! The others took off running at that. I had one down pretty quick but the last was fast, or maybe just motived - at least a quarter mile before I cornered her against a ridge, flailing at thin air with her pool cue and screaming, 'Demon cow, demon cow!'"

"Demon cow?"

"Yeah, I looked back to find Spike right on my heels, heads down and the devil blazing in all four eyes."

"I might wet myself just picturing that."

"I let the raider go. I was laughing too hard to waste the ammo, and anyway it took all I had to get Spike turned around, pointed back to where we left Lucy and Duncan. She was determined to run down every last raider in the gang."

"She's perfect for the comic. Actually, that's the only thing Lamplight was missing - a psychotic animal mascot. The Unstoppables are doomed."

"She was pretty great. Unfortunately, she met her match in a couple of yaoguai. I honestly think if it had been only one, she'd have stomped him to dust, but two…no. They had her belly open before I could take them down, and that was it. Lucy cried half the night, and I couldn't blame her…broke my heart butchering what they left. We sold all the meat at the next stop, just didn't have the stomach for it."

"Poor thing. At least she died a hero. Not many milk cows can say that."

She crumples the empty package and drops it into the embers. The greasy cardboard flames up and burns out in a few seconds. She's quiet again, but it's an easier quiet. Like she's got her head back in the present.

"You dream about the vault again?"

"Oh, I guess you noticed…no, actually. More of a memory."

"Bad one?"

"Yes…well, yes and no. Bad leading to good. You ever make it up to Baltimore?"

"Where's that?"

"The city north of DC."

"That's what it was called? No, but Lucy always wanted to. There's supposed to be a huge hospital in the centre staffed with the descendants of the old doctors, still using their pre-war tech. We got as far as Silver Spring, once, but then Duncan came a month early, and afterward it was easier to stay in familiar territory."

"I can't imagine what it's like going through labour out here."

He shrugs and tells the same lie other parents fed them before Duncan was born.

"Eh. Not fun, but not so bad, either. There wouldn't be so many people around if it was all that hard."

"Hmm. I guess."

"You've survived it already, anyway."

"Well, sure, with a midwife and an autodoc and a really excellent cocktail of painkillers, and…honestly, Mac, I'm not up to remembering that. I can't really think about Shaun without…without everything getting wobbly around the edges."

"Yeah, I get that. So tell me what you dreamed about instead. Unless that's about Shaun too…"

"No, no, just another stupid fight. We drove up to a housewarming - a couple we knew from school bought a big house on Fayette, and most of the old Massachusetts Bay gang showed up. It was fun, catching up with friends, dancing to those old banned records - probably one of the best nights out we'd had in years. So of course we got into a massive fight on the drive home. It took such a nasty turn I got out and walked - middle of the night, in January, and this was back when we had real winters, snow and ice and wind that'd nearly freeze the skin from your face."

She rubs her cheeks, thumb and forefinger tracing the faint scar cut across them.

"Hardly anyone else was dumb enough to be driving on the highway in ankle-deep slush, so I hadn't managed to hitch a ride a little over a mile later when I found Nate kicking the Corvega - he'd fishtailed off the road and hit the railing hard enough to trigger the fission cell's safety cutoff. We had to sit in the freezing, dead car and wait for the tow truck, but he gave me his coat to wrap around my legs. We, well…we were pretty well sobered up by then. We talked about splitting up…agreed neither of us really wanted to, we just wanted to be better together…that's actually when we decided to quit drinking. And to give counselling a shot. So, it had a happy ending. For a while, anyway."

"Yeah, I guess so…although, it was pretty low to kick you out like that."

"No, that was me. I pulled over and left him there - he was definitely too hammered to drive. Not that 'not drunk' exactly equaled 'not out of my damn mind'. And I'm leading an army now! Just wait until we break the Institute with our synchronized 'storming off in a huff' manoeuvre."

"You'd have the element of surprise, at least. What the heck were you fighting about to pull something like that, anyway?"

"The actual words…they weren't the fight. He'd already decided he wasn't going to reenlist. It was his dream, his entire family's dream, that he'd be another General Freis in their trophy collection, but he was miserable. I was too, with that lousy job, sneaking Nate up to my room like we were still in school, the one month out of every twelve I actually got to spend with him. And we'd been trying to start a family for ages, with no luck…and there were our college friends, already doctors, real lawyers, managers, most of them complaining how little sleep they'd had since the babies were born. So we were arguing over money and the furlough he spent in Seoul and if I was encouraging Ted's old crush on me, all with such strategic fury we could've won Anchorage back in a day, either one of us."

She stares at the statue in front of the monument, eyes narrow, jaw working like she was foolish enough to try chewing one of those pre-war packs of gum, and jumps when he squeezes her knee. She shakes her head and grinds out a chuckle that sounds as genuine as Parker Quinn's charge card.

"There'd been a girl in Vegas. That wasn't news - he'd confessed after it was over - but he made some…unflattering comparisons. So I left him to freeze by Route 29, forgetting he had his own keys to my car."

He wonders how stupid it'd feel, breaking open one of those cryopods just to punch a dead guy. Probably worth it.

"Anyway, walking along that freezing highway is just a stupid anxiety dream I get sometimes, like taking a test for a class I never went to, or giving a speech when all my teeth fall out. I'm just…afraid of the next few steps, that I'm not up to it."

"You're more than up to it. You know that."

"Maybe."

Even if his mind was on it, the last thing he'd want to do is talk her into the Glowing Sea if she's faltering - and if they're lucky, she'll only have to convince a few crazy idealists to let her at their hidden synths instead, which she could do in her sleep. Mostly, though, he can't figure out why someone like her, who makes the biggest forces in the Commonwealth dance to her tune and like it, would put up with so much crap from one guy…or maybe just why she stuck so hard with Nate but keeps him at arm's length.

"Not that I actually want to know, but Nor…the sex couldn't of been _that_ good."

She stares at him for a moment, wheezing out a chuckle that sounds more like he punched her, then lets loose with a shocked bellow of laughter that echoes through the empty market hall before she can slap a hand over her mouth. Shaking silently, she leans into him until he gives up being offended and puts an arm around her, reluctantly smiling at the scrinched monkey-face she pulls holding her breath. She's finally only able to answer in a whisper, between shallow gulps of air.

"Uh, no…no, it wasn't…not to make it worth…putting up with either of us, on its own. Heh. Oh…Christ. Sorry Mac, the look on your face…"

"What look?"

"Kinda like I fed you something horrible and then slapped you. Which maybe says something about me, that I laughed at it. I am sorry."

"Don't - it doesn't matter. It's just, I don't get it. Maybe I don't have to."

"If you want an explanation for why we stuck it out…maybe I wasn't as lapsed a catholic as I thought. Or maybe everyone else around us was screwing up too, wicked terrified underneath the frantic eat, drink, and be merry routine, so it was easier to forgive each other and try again."

She sighs and leans on his shoulder, restlessly rubbing his arm.

"We rushed into it, getting engaged after only a few months. Most people did, then, afraid if they didn't grab a chance at happiness, they'd never have another. If we took our time, argued out a lot of differences before it felt like we were trapped if the other person won, things wouldn't have gotten so bad. It's…not a mistake I want to repeat."

"There's worse mistakes."

"At least they'd be new ones. Anyway…this was all a long time ago. And we should get moving. Unless you want to watch the sun rise first from up in that obelisk?"

"That what?"

"The giant concrete dong."

He chortles halfway up the stairs, trying to shake the image of the rest of the concrete guy lying buried under Bunker Hill, until she glances coyly over her shoulder and reaches for his hand and, no, she's got no interest in the sunrise. He hurries his pace up the dark, mist-slippery steps. At the top, there's a chair and table cluttered with a radio, a nuka cola and a _Live & Love_ comic.

"Looks like there's usually a guard up here."

His warning is half-hearted at best, easily ignored. He hopes she does; it's been a few days, and that was just a few stolen moments in a collapsing boathouse with half his attention wasted on the razorclaws not far from shore.

She hops on the table, bouncing a few times to check its sturdiness.

"They're not here now. Think we can beat the shift change?"

"Not that it's something to be proud of, but yeah. We definitely could."

"Table's just about the right height for me to lean on, if you're up for it…"

"Ehhh…nah, that's not really my thing, Nor."

She likes it, she's said, bent over with him behind, and it's fine when she's looking back at him with that wicked grin, but when she lets her head hang down, stifling any noise…it reminds him of the warnings about raider captives, or worse, the tales his Gunner "brothers" used to relish about keeping an enemy combatant in camp for a few days before mercy-killing them. Not the kind of road stories he really wants to share with her, especially not when she's unbuckling his belt and brushing her cheek against the stubble on his neck, but she doesn't seem to want an excuse anyway.

"Sit on the chair, then."

"You sure? You don't have to."

"I like to."

He hopes that's true, as she undoes the zipper on his undersuit, or else she's been putting herself out a heck of a lot lately. She tugs at his knees and he slouches forward, spreading his legs so she can kneel between them. He keeps his hands on the armrests; she can "accidentally" pull his hair all she wants, but if he gets his fingers tangled in her knotty curls just one more time, he's losing a hand. It's not exactly fair, but he's sure not complaining.

He inhales sharply as she engulfs his half-hard cock in one smooth motion, teasingly rubbing her nose in the rough hair at the root. Her hands are already on his hips, holding him still and tugging his trousers lower as she swallows around his rapidly thickening cock, pulling back to work her lips around the head, her eyes closed like she's savoring the feel of him, and no, no, he's never complaining.

He lets his head fall back, biting his lip against the groan bubbling up in his chest. She moves her hands lower, one gently rolling his balls between her fingers, the other around the base of his cock, sliding up to meet her lips and back, slow and lazy like they got all the time in the world. She'll rush things if they're out in the field, but in friendly territory, even if she says they'd better hurry, she never does. By some miracle they've only been busted once since Goodneighbor, caught by a night guard behind the old screen at the Starlight Drive-In, and she just pointed a sharp eyebrow at the guy until _he_ apologised and backed off with his hands up.

It's flattering, almost, how little she cares if the entire Commonwealth gets a first-hand eyeball at their relationship, but it doesn't do much to sooth the twist of anxiety in his belly at the faint noises below from Bunker Hill's first early risers. They really don't have much time.

He covers her hand with his and squeezes harder, shifting the angle she's got him at a little lower. She rolls her eyes but, when he shrugs, leaves off just teasing him with her tongue and lips and roughly takes in most of his length, sucking hard as she pulls back. He hisses in a startled breath and sinks his teeth into the rough ballistic weave of his sleeve as she sets a fast rhythm with her hand and mouth. Her other thumb rubs small circles on the skin behind his balls - one of those new-old _Housewife's Choice_ tricks she'll try out, when he asks - and together it's all good, very good, will definitely do the job. He's not going to ask, not going to push his luck any further, but the last couple times she has offered…

"You want me to - "

"Yeah."

He looks away, face flaming, as a spit-slick finger gently probes and slips inside him, riding out the heartbeats of weird pressure and stretching, the slight burn and her whispered _sorry, bad angle_ , until she hits that spot that sparks straight up his spine, wringing a faint whimper out of him, and he simultaneously really, really hopes they're not caught and can't care less if every merchant and guard in the place barges in. He nods when she whispers again, _better?_ and opens his eyes to catch the focused look on her face, the same one she gets cracking a particularly difficult terminal, give way to a kind of feral hunger as she curls her finger.

He slides further down the chair, barely feeling the splintery wood scrape his neck, not quite shameless enough to writhe against her hand and mouth but not far from it, either. His breath fogs in the cold pre-dawn air, forced through teeth clenched against the undignified whining noises sneaking out anyway. Her finger moves inside him, feeling huge and delicate as it teases whatever's back there that's like a live wire connecting every nerve in his body to the base of his cock.

And it's definitely teasing. She's slowed her pace again, working her tongue along a particularly sensitive stretch of nerves on every upstroke, and there's a glint in her eye that says she's not going to let him come until she's broken him.

"Goddammit, Nor…"

"Hmm?"

"Quick and quiet, right?"

"Hmph."

He catches a hand in her hair, amputation threats be damned, holds her steady as gently as he can with his entire body tense and trembling. She shifts her grip to the base of him, loosely, so he won't risk choking her as he thrusts, harder and faster than he'd normally dare. She moves with him, head bobbing, and somewhere in the sea of pounding need to get off is a spark of gratitude that she's still so careful not to hurt him with her teeth, even when he's using her like this.

Her finger twists, stretching him as he goes over the edge with one final hard push that hits the back of her throat, emptying himself with a moan that's almost definitely audible to the courtyard below.

He winces at the quick sharp pain when she yanks her hand away from him, bracing herself on his knee as she coughs and swallows, rubbing her mouth and nose with her other fingers. She waves off his apology before he can do more than open his mouth, gesturing for him to scoot back so she can put him back together, dropping a kiss on the still leaking head of his cock before she carefully does up the zipper. He lets her take care of him and settle on his lap, resting her hand over the heart that's still doing its damnedest to batter through his ribs. She whispers hoarsely in his ear.

"I love that you let me do that to you."

"I love _you_ "

"Likewise."

"Say it right."

"I love you too. You know that."

Enough rest; she's got the fly of her fatigues open and shivers as he slips his cold hands up underneath her shirt until he hits the strap of her chest piece, pulling her down to kiss him. There's the taste of him and the coppery edge of blood and after an alarmed moment he remembers the twisting dark staircase and the raider who'd split her lip, blindly swinging his shotgun at the spectre who'd risen out of nowhere.

Relieved, he reaches between her legs, where she's swollen and slippery and it's never not amazing how worked up she gets just working him over. He wishes they were back in Sanctuary or their usual room in the Rex, that he had time to get it up again and fuck her, even bent over if that's what she wants. He's never in his life felt so wanted.

She whimpers against his lips and he really _really_ wants to return the favour, drag it out until she's the one cursing and begging to come, but there's no time, and he's sure as hell not going to leave her wanting, not after that. And anyway, she's so far gone already he's not sure he could slow her down, twitching around the fingers he slides into her. He holds her tight to his chest, ignoring the sting of fingers clenched in his hair - as freaking usual - kissing her neck as far down as that blasted chest plate will let him while she grinds on his hand. He rolls her clit under his thumb the way she usually likes it, hard and fast, crooking his fingers inside her, and the similarity of the motions makes him wonder if she feels exactly like he just did, or if it's really that different for women.

No time to linger on philosophy, not when she's gasping in his ear, _Jesus, Mac_ , her thighs squeezing his wrist. _C'mon, Nor_ , he whispers back, _come for me_ , like she needs the encouragement, already dropping bonelessly into his chest. And he wonders as she whispers again through the end of a deep sigh, _Jesus Christ, Mac_ , what the heck kinda karma he had to cash in that this, Nora happy and satisfied in his arms, it's routine.

The sky to the east is lighter but still only blue when they're decent again. She takes the comic book and cola from the table, her lips moving in the shape of _finders keepers_ as she twists off the cap. _Live & Love_ has never been one of his favourites, but he takes the bottle and settles on the freezing step next to her when she flicks on the pip-boy light to read, heads together behind the pages, waiting for the sun to rise.


End file.
